In their football season opener, St. Pius X-St. Matthias Academy, a Catholic school in Downey in Los Angeles county, lost to Buchanan High (of Clovis), 38-0.
The next week, the Warriors fell 56-14 to Crean Lutheran (Irvine). Six consecutive losses followed before St. Pius X-St. Matthias notched its first win. But after dropping their regular season finale, the Warriors, with a 1-9 record, thought their season was over.
Except it wasn’t.
Instead, the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) awarded St. Pius X-Matthias Academy a berth in the Division 8 football playoffs for the Southern Section. Given second life, the team ran off five consecutive victories and advanced to a state championship game.
How? The answer lies in a peculiar California application of a popular and controversial word:
Equity.
Equity is the most powerful of the three values embodied in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI. It’s also controversial. Because it goes beyond equality, and demands disrupting existing systems, to achieve fair outccomes. And because it’s hard to get argumentative Americans to agree on what’s fair.
The difficulties of achieving equity have fueled fierce backlash, and the rollback of DEI programs in universities and workplaces. But intriguingly, the quest for equity is alive and advancing in California high school sports.
Indeed, “competitive equity” has become a central principle of CIF, the school sports governing body, and the guide for how it conducts post-season playoffs.
Since California is too big to include al high schools in a single playoff tournament, CIF has long organized teams into divisions for playoffs. In each division, all schools are supposed to be on the same competitive level.
Except they rarely were, before competitive equity.
Why not? Because divisions were based on factors other than team performance. One such factor was student enrollment. For decades, divisions were based on school size. But school enrollment wasn’t a good proxy for sports excellence. Smaller private schools with wealthy athletic boosters could recruit players and build programs far stronger than those of big, budget-stretched public schools.
In the 2010s, CIF officials concluded that the best way to make division playoffs fair was to use a rankings system for all high school teams. Schools with similar rankings would be placed in the same division.
CIF called this new system “competitive equity.” The original rankings had problems, including ranking teams based on previous years rather than their current season. Eventually, CIF made adjustments. Today, it waits until after the regular season to rank and place teams in division for playoffs. So, each post-season, different teams are in different divisions. The resulting playoffs are full of surprises.
None more surprising than St. Pius X-St. Matthias.
The Warriors was a playoff contender because the competitive equity rankings count not just wins and losses, but strength of schedule. And St. Pius X-St. Matthias faced an unusually strong group of opponents; nine of the ten teams they played qualified for the playoffs.
But the Warriors had to be lucky. When the CIF creates a division, it first includes all the automatic playoff qualifiers — teams that finished first in their leagues. It then uses competitive equity rankings to add teams with had records of .500 or better. But in Division 8, there weren’t enough at-large teams with .500-or-better records to fill the 16-team field.
So St. Pius got a spot. In the playoffs, the young Warriors grew up and won four games to take the Southern Section championship.
Then they played the San Diego section champion, St. Augustine, in the regional final. St. Augustine had a worse record than the Warriors. The Saints lost all 10 regular season games, but they also had a brutal schedule that won them a playoff spot under the competitive equity system.
A regional final between two teams with a combined regular season record of 1-19 drew national media scrutiny, including from Sports Illustrated and FOX Sports. Warriors coach Devah Thomas acknowledged the strangeness. “I don’t make the rules, I just follow them. They want competitive equity,” he told former USC star-turned-pocaster Keyshawn Johnson. “We fit the criteria.”
The Warriors’ magical run ended in the state championship game with a 52-34 loss to the 12-2 Sonora High School Wildcats, from a small town in Tuolumne County.
But competitive equity’s winning streak continues. This school year, the CIF Southern Section extended competitive equity beyond football and basketball to playoffs in all sports. And the critics didn’t complain.
Why not? Maybe that’s because this is sports, where equity creates entertaining games, rather than human resources edicts. Or maybe it’s just easier to see in the Warriors’ season what equity was supposed to do all along: give the people who faced tougher opposition a fair chance to be champions.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square, an ASU Media Enterprise publication.
